A leading Afghan official working on women's rights has been shot dead in the southern province of Kandahar. Safia Amajan, head of the province's women's department, was leaving her home for work when a gunman on a motorcycle opened fire, police said. She may have been targeted by Taleban militants because of their opposition to women taking part in politics and education, the BBC's Dan Isaacs says. Hundreds have died in clashes between troops and Taleban fighters this year. Nato-led forces have been battling a resurgent Taleban militia, with some of the fiercest fighting taking place in the south of the country. ... http://news.bbc.co.uk

Civil war is raging through the Iraqi countryside. Sunni insurgents have largely taken control of the province of Diyala, where local leaders believe the insurgents are close to establishing a "Taliban republic". Officials in the strategically important province - composed of a mixture of Sunnis and Shias with a Kurdish minority - have no doubt about what is happening. Lt-Col Ahmed Ahmed Nuri Hassan, a weary-looking commander of the federal police, says: "Now there is an ethnic civil war and it is getting worse every day."At the moment, the Sunni seem to be winning.As the violence has escalated over the past three years, it has become too dangerous for journalists to find out what is happening in the provinces outside the capital. The UN said last week that 5,106 civilians were killed in Baghdad in July and August and 1,493 in the provinces outside it....http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article1747149.ece

The Bush administration's new envoy to Sudan said his mission to try to stop the genocide in Darfur will be a daunting assignment. Andrew Natsios, a former head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, said his new job will be "one of the most difficult I've had." In an interview Friday, he compared it to his work on Boston's "Big Dig." Natsios was chairman and chief executive officer of the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority for a year. In 2000, he was brought in to try to get the calamity-plagued bridge and tunnel project on track.Natsios said his first task will be to convince the Sudanese government to stop bombarding rebel villages in Darfur and allow the deployment of United Nations peacekeepers in the western Sudanese region, which is the size of France....http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2006-09-24-sudan-us-envoy_x.htm?csp=34

The Paparazzi Bandit photographs bank tellers as he robs them. The Goofy Hat Bandit wears a black fedora. The Hallmark Bandit writes lengthy notes demanding cash — and sometimes asks tellers if they had a good weekend.These serial bank robbers, and a few others, are behind what authorities say is an unusual surge in bank robberies during the last few months in Los Angeles, one of several U.S. cities where such crimes have ticked upward recently.FBI officials say they are concerned that bank robberies — generally a high-risk, low-reward type of crime — might be increasing again after declining nationwide since 2001. Numbers for 2006 won't be available for months.It's unclear precisely why Los Angeles, Dallas, Chicago and other cities are seeing a jump in bank robberies, but it appears to be part of a general increase in violent crimes nationwide, says Chip Burrus, the FBI's assistant director for criminal investigations....http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-09-24-bank-robberies_x.htm?csp=34

In a video released by their rebel captors, Colombian lawmakers held hostage for more than four years pleaded with President Alvaro Uribe to negotiate with leftist guerrillas to secure their release. The recording broadcast on local television was the latest from the 12 provincial lawmakers since their kidnapping in 2002 by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, the largest rebel group in Colombia's four-decade conflict. The FARC wants Uribe to withdraw troops from two municipalities to start an exchange of rebel prisoners for 62 hostages, including three U.S. contract workers and Colombian-French national Ingrid Betancourt, a former presidential candidate. ...http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=2486139

Publishers of two popular reading programs that were largely excluded from President Bush's $1-billion-a-year reading initiative say they will ask Education Secretary Margaret Spellings this week to tell school districts nationwide their programs are eligible for federal funding. Their requests come in the wake of an Education Department internal review that found federal officials mismanaged the Reading First program, forcing schools to buy materials the administration favored, including a few to which federal advisers had financial ties.The highly critical report, issued Friday by the department's inspector general, found that in 2002 and 2003, several top officials, including the program's then director, Chris Doherty, stacked advisory panels, improperly dictated which programs states approved and ignored possible conflicts of interest on expert review panels....http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2006-09-24-reading-first_x.htm?csp=34